Jimmy Chin Just Can't Stop Climbing

How one of the most popular stars in adventure sports got to the summit—and where he's going from here.

By
Gordy Megroz

Apr 20, 2016

Monte Isom

It is the first week of January in western Wyoming, right around zero degrees, but the cold doesn't seem to bother Jimmy Chin.

"Hopefully we'll find some soft snow," he says, looking up at Mount Glory, a 10,032-foot peak atop Teton Pass near Jackson Hole, the town Chin has called home for more than a decade. He straps his skis to his pack—a design from The North Face equipped with a nitrogen-triggered air bag that prevents being buried in an avalanche—and starts uphill, the snow squeaking beneath his boots with each step. The climb will lead to some of the more accessible backcountry skiing in the Tetons—terrain full of 40-degree pitches, powder stashes, and open tree skiing. For most people, the one-and-a-half-mile hike takes an hour from the trailhead to the top. Chin can do it in half that, and he's been known to lap Glory ten times in a single day.

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"I'm happy to be out here," he says. "I needed to get moving."

Yeah, right. Chin is always moving. At forty-two, he's one of the world's most prolific adventurers. He was one of the first Americans to climb and ski Everest, in 2006. He has made rock-climbing first ascents (making him the first person to climb the route) on multiple continents. He has crossed the Chang Tang Plateau, a three-hundred-mile, high-altitude trek in northwestern Tibet—on foot.

Monte Isom

But he's best known for his successful 2011 assault on the Shark's Fin, a climbing route up India's 20,700-foot-high Mount Meru. For decades the Himalayan peak was considered unclimbable, mostly because of a sheer granite face that crumbles under a climber's weight. In 2008, Chin, along with veteran mountaineer Conrad Anker and climbing prodigy Renan Ozturk, got less than 350 feet from the top before a lack of provisions forced them to turn around.

That climb and the trio's 2011 reattempt are captured in last year's documentary Meru, directed by Chin and his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Filmed on a tiny budget with just two handheld cameras, the movie has earned more than $2 million at the box office as well as the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. (The acclaim isn't all that surprising. Chin has long been a revered photographer. In 2011, his National Geographic cover photo of climber Alex Honnold standing on a ledge of Yosemite's Half Dome—considered among climbers to be one of the sport's most iconic images—required Chin to rappel down the granite face and spend several hours rigging camera equipment five thousand feet above the valley floor.) In Meru, you watch anxiously as Chin gets pelted by falling ice, affixes climbing ropes with frozen fingers, and sleeps inside tented portaledges hanging thousands of feet above the ground. And you wonder: Why? How did he get here?

Chin first took up climbing while at Minnesota's Carleton College. After he graduated in 1996, his parents—Chinese immigrants who moved to the U.S. in 1962—expected him to get a graduate degree. Instead, he moved to California's Yosemite National Park and lived in his 1989 Subaru Loyale.

"I was only gonna stay a year, then go to law school," he says. "I stayed seven."

In 2003, he relocated to Jackson, where he learned ski-mountaineering skills and further pushed his limits. "When I moved here," Chin says, stopping about three-quarters of the way up Glory and looking out at the Tetons, "I'd ski and climb these huge mountains, and there were the same ten guys out here—total dark horses—just sending it, skiing and climbing things that nobody else would even consider. They were setting the bar high, and I aspired to do what they did. I try to live intentionally, and the things that move me, I'm going to throw myself at them. I want to see what my potential is. I'm always curious to see what the edge is."

Chin nearly went over that edge for good in early 2011, when he was caught in a massive avalanche inside Grand Teton National Park. Somehow, after being tossed for two thousand feet in a giant washing machine of snow, he walked away unhurt. He admits that experience as well as becoming a father—he and Vasarhelyi, a New York City native, have a two-year-old daughter and a newborn son and now split their time between Jackson and Manhattan—have caused him to be more cautious. "I won't ski in the backcountry the day after a big storm anymore," he says. "The mountains are so humbling. As soon as you think you're on top or crushing it, that's when you need to be really careful."

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But not too careful. The avalanche conditions in the Tetons have been sketchy all winter, and as Chin hikes he steps purposefully, gauging the terrain, looking to avoid more unstable slopes—ones that have gotten more wind or sun.

"You have to take risks," he says emphatically. "You don't progress unless you take risks."

That attitude combined with the success of Meru have made Chin one of the most popular stars in adventure sports. Chin hiking up Teton Pass is akin to Matt Damon walking down Hollywood Boulevard.

"This is my first time up here," calls out a woman in her fifties. "You inspired me!"

"You're doing great!" Chin says.

At the top of Glory, Chin peers north toward 13,775-foot Grand Teton, the highest peak in the range. Moisture freezes in the deep-blue sky, creating a sparkly, snow-globe effect, and Chin breathes it in while surveying the slope. It hasn't snowed in over a week and the windscoured snow has developed a crusty shell. But he has skied much worse, including Everest's "awful, bulletproof ice" which he calls "the worst ski run of my life."

Chin clicks into his skis and pushes downhill. With ease, he carves fast turns through the Wyoming crud. At five foot seven and built solid, like a slot receiver, he's able to power through the choppy surface and seems unfazed by chunks of ice and drifts of powder, simply using his poles as levers to help him hop-turn around the obstacles. Ten minutes later, he slides into Glory's base, takes off his skis, and throws them over his shoulder. Chin is almost always smiling, but now his grin has widened and his sentences are cut by short chuckles. "It's weird to turn forty and feel like you're twenty-five," he says. "I'm as motivated as ever to do expeditions."

And make movies. He's already working on his next documentary, a project he's not yet ready to disclose. And he's regularly crisscrossing the country, giving talks and fundraising for more projects.

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